Larkin crosses to the reading table and gestures for me to sit. I do, and he takes the chair across from me, folding his hands in a way that is almost ceremonial.
“I’ve read every book in this room,” he says. “The answers aren’t here.”
“Then where?”
He glances at the back wall, where the shelves thin out and the plaster bulges in odd, organic shapes, like tumors. “There’s another library. A private one. Past the servant’s stairs.”
I remember the hallway Whitby warned me never to use. “You’re not supposed to go there.”
He smiles, all teeth. “That’s why it matters.”
We sit in silence for a long minute, the only sound thefaint, animal creak of the house settling. The light is fading now, the pattern on the floor dissolving into shadow. I feel the weight of every book, every story, pressing in on us from all sides.
“Will you take me?” I ask.
He tilts his head, as if evaluating a piece of art for hidden flaws. “You’re sure? The house won’t like it.”
I wonder what that means, but I decide I don’t want to know for now. “No,” I answer him. “But I want to see for myself.”
He stands, and for the first time since I have known him, Larkin looks almost afraid.
“Follow me,” he says.
We move through the halls, past the orderly rows of portraits to the the staff door near the kitchen. He opens it and ushers me in. This corridor is narrower, with a lower ceiling, the walls painted a bland white. This area is all utilitarian, with no rug lining the floor or paintings on the walls. After a left turn, we come to one of the servants’ stairways. Beyond it looks innocuous at first glance, but since I know it’s there, I see a hidden doorway made to blend in with the plaster. The only tell is a thin outline and a shallow metal knob.
He opens the narrow door, reveals a staircase descending into darkness. The air here is colder, sharper, and the dust tastes like old teeth.
Larkin leads the way, his footsteps soundless. I follow, refusing to look back, refusing to let the house see me hesitate.
At the bottom, there is the second library—smaller, but denser, the books pressed into shelves like vertebrae. He flicks a light switch on the room illuminates with a golden glow. The air is thick with secrets.
He turns to me, voice barely above a whisper. “This is where we’ll find where the pattern starts.”
The private library is a reliquary for secrets that never expected to be disturbed. The shelves bow under the weight of ledgers, treatises, family Bibles whose pages are as thin as the skin on a convalescent’s wrist. At the center, a battered table cowers beneath a storm cloud of loose parchment, dried flowers, glass paperweights gone cloudy with age.
Larkin crosses to the shelves, trailing his fingers over the crumbling leather spines until he stops at a shelf set lower than the rest, eye-level only if you were a child or if you cared enough to kneel. He crouches, pulls a volume with both hands. The cover resists, then gives with a breathy sigh, dislodging a puff of ancient dust that sparkles and falls.
He carries the folio to the table. Even in this light, I see it’s a primitive binding—cracked leather, the title etched in a script that shivers into illegibility. He opens it with the slow, steady hands of a surgeon about to make the first cut.
“It’s older than the house,” he says, his voice softened by reverence or fear, I can’t decide. “Dates to the first building on the hill. Before Hemlock, before even the town had a name.”
I sit across from him, as close to the lamp as I dare. The pages inside are a confusion of languages and hands. Some of the text is in Latin, some in a kind of local Old English dialect, and some is so old and misshapen it barely qualifies as language at all. The margins crawl with annotations in a woman’s hand, looping, assertive, each note crowding out the text it was meant to clarify.
There are illustrations, too. Primitive woodcuts, the ink bled and faded, each image framed by a border of leaves. The leaves are holly and hemlock, drawn so obsessively I half expect the margins to prickle under my touch.
The first image is of a woman. Her face is oval,eyes dark, hair plaited into a crown of thorns and leaves. She is surrounded by plants, some in bloom, some gone to seed, and in her lap is an open book, its pages blank.
“Her name was Anwen,” Larkin says, reading the caption aloud. “A healer. Or a witch, depending on who wrote the history.” He flips a few pages, careful not to tear the brittle paper. “She lived here, on this hill, before the first stone was set.”
“Did she curse the land?” I ask.
He snorts. “That’s the convenient version. The real story’s more complicated.”
He scans the next page, mouth moving silently as he parses the archaic script. “She grew everything from seed,” he says, summarizing. “Knew the use for every leaf, every root. She had a garden that was the envy of three counties.” He looks up, eyes catching the lamp’s gold. “But the holly and the hemlock—she planted those as boundaries. To mark her domain. To keep out what she didn’t want.”
I touch the border on the illustration. The holly is drawn with obsessive detail, every spine and berry rendered in black and red. The hemlock, by contrast, is paler, ghostly, like the shadow of a plant rather than the thing itself.
“Why those two?” I ask.
